by Kim Adrian
I felt nauseated but kept running, taking only quiet side streets because I was worried that my mother might jump in her car and follow me. Eventually, I made it to the bus stop, where I bought a one-way ticket to New York City.
I was about to make a string of very poor decisions, but at the time I had no idea of this. At the time I was only thinking about how I’d just succeeded in getting away from my mother, and that made me feel invincible. I felt nimble and young.
Once I got to the city, I called everyone I knew, which amounted to four people. None of them were home. My best friend at the time was a girl named Annie, whose parents were divorced and whose mother lived on West 74th Street. Annie often spent weekends with her mother, so I went to the Upper West Side, thinking I’d call every hour or so until one of them came home. But nobody picked up that night. Nobody picked up at the home of an ex-boyfriend either, and nobody picked up at the apartment of a boy with a cleft lip whom I’d met just a month earlier on Block Island. Even the shrink I’d seen for a while after I’d gotten kicked out of boarding school didn’t pick up.
I bought two hot dogs and an orange juice at Gray’s Papaya, then walked around. At some point I wandered into a trendy clothing shop. I was only looking to kill time, so I tried on things I couldn’t possibly afford, but the owner didn’t seem to mind. In fact, when I told him I was stranded in the city and didn’t know what to do with myself and that I was only there because I had no place else to go, he said that I could try on as many things as I liked for as long as I wanted. I can’t remember his name, only that he was passingly handsome and had an accent. He might have been from Morocco, but that’s a fairly wild guess at this point. He wasn’t tall, and he wasn’t short; he wasn’t thin or fat; he wasn’t pale or dark. His hair, though, was pitch-black and so richly oiled that it gleamed under the track lights. He smoked unfiltered Gitanes and had very long eyelashes, and it was these, I believe, that contributed to the impression that he was smiling even when he wasn’t.
I tried on many things that night, especially as it had started to rain, so I couldn’t walk around outside anymore. The man with the long eyelashes let me use his telephone, but still no one picked up at Annie’s or at my ex-boyfriend’s or at the home of the boy with the cleft lip or at my old shrink’s office. Once I came out of the dressing room wearing a very short black shift made of thin T-shirt material, and the shop owner let out a long whistle. The dress cost over ninety dollars, but he said he’d sell it to me for half that if he could take me out dancing later.
Of course, I was still young, though I don’t see, now, why I’d decided to take such a narrow view of my own fate that night. But at least I had a place to sleep, and that seemed important. I suppose I was lucky in the grand scheme of things: I didn’t have to camp out on a park bench, and there were no lasting physical ramifications of our time together. It wasn’t a terrible night, but in another sense it wasn’t anything at all. After the dancing we went back to the man’s apartment, where he lit a dozen candles in his living room, with its leather sectional seating and huge windows that looked out over the Hudson. He poured me a glass of alcohol, something amber colored, of which I took micro sips. A bit later I had a moment of drama in the bathroom, as I stared into my own eyes in the mirror above the sink before joining him in his bedroom, which I remember as being cramped and smelling faintly of sour milk and garlic. The comforter was beige and pilled and lightly stained. Underneath it I felt nothing at all.
No Doubt
Stone fruit, which includes plums, peaches, and apricots, cannot propagate unless their hard pits (their stones) are cracked open. Only then can the life potential of the seed hidden inside be released. The same is true for us, wrote Khalil Gibran: just as the fruit’s stone must break wide open to free the germ, so must we know pain in order to release the understanding hidden in our hearts.
Nutcracker
E—, New Jersey, 1984
By the time this picture was taken, I was already going to college in New York City. Freshman year. I’m only back for the holiday—just a quick visit. My father’s back too, even though this is not his home. It seems we’ve just decorated the Christmas tree because my parents are standing in front of it like it’s an event. At the top of the tree the little angel with the white candyfloss hair holds her hands together in prayer. The green satin pear and glittery gumdrop man dangle nearby. The tall wooden nutcracker, with his soft rabbit fur beard, stands sentry on the coffee table under a pitch-black window. My father has taken off his glasses, but you can still see the imprint of them on the bridge of his nose. My mother hugs him, nestling her head against his chest. She smiles as she looks into the camera, seems almost at ease. With exaggerated weariness he tilts his eyes up to the ceiling. We’d fallen so far as a family by this point. And yet we had no idea. There was so much further to go.
O
Obscure
“Word salad,” also known as “expressive aphasia,” is a speech disorder in which words are strung together in nongrammatical, nonsensical combinations with the cadences of normal speech. On the afternoon of January 1, 1985, my father suddenly produced long, angry strings of this type of speech while brandishing a *knife at my mother, Tracy, and Grandma Ellen, who was visiting for the day. Somebody—I’ve never known which of the three women—got away and called 911. The police arrived within a matter of minutes to arrest my father and bring him down to the police station. There they gave him a choice: jail or rehab. He chose rehab.
I know none of this firsthand. I was a freshman at Barnard College and had opted to spend almost all of Christmas break in New York City, in my abandoned dorm, mostly in order to avoid spending time with my mother because by then we fought almost constantly.
My parents had already officially divorced, although they still tried to “keep things friendly,” which is why we’d spent Christmas together and why, I assume, my father was in my mother’s apartment on New Year’s Day. But why did he snap? That he was drunk seems likely, and yet normally my father was taciturn, *morose, and withdrawn when he drank, but that day he was quite talky, even if the words themselves made no sense. I’ve asked Tracy about what happened many times, but she’s close-lipped when it comes to the past, especially the ugly parts, and for years, whenever I pressed her for details about this event, she would tell me only that it had been “no big deal” and that it “sounds worse than it was.” But last Christmas, when she came out from Chicago for a visit and she and I went for a walk after dinner along the Muddy River, I asked her again about that day, so long ago now, and for some reason she opened up a little.
“Honestly, I think he just couldn’t take it anymore. You know what she’s like. Di-di-di-di-di-di-di!”
It was dusk, and there aren’t many lights along the river, but I could still see the gesture she made with her gloved hand, touching her fingers and thumb together in imitation of a mouth talking very quickly.
“You know how it is. She just wouldn’t shut up, and it was like his brain finally snapped and he just—” Here my sister made a bunch of squeaky high-pitched noises, then stopped to give me a look of impatience because she didn’t like my expression. She thinks I take things too seriously.
“No, really,” she said, walking more quickly all of a sudden so that she was a good three or four feet ahead of me. “You had to be there. It wasn’t scary at all. It was just weird. Almost funny. Or pathetic. Or sad mostly. Really, it was just sad.”
Obvious
David was at Columbia when I was at Barnard. We’d been dating for just a few weeks when, one Sunday afternoon, he decided to make a pot of black bean soup in his dorm kitchen. It didn’t look like much—dark, lumpy. But it smelled like delicate woodsmoke, and we ladled it into chipped mugs, then brought the mugs, for some reason, outside. It was very foggy that day, and the streets—at least as I remember them now—were almost completely deserted as the mist swirled through them. Walking together, talking, eating that soup (inky, earthy, salty, sweet), I sud
denly felt that at least one thing in my life was clear.
Ode
We’ve been lucky so far up here in Maine, on the island: the weather’s been perfect—warm and sunny through the belly of the day, cool at night, foggy in the mornings. We’ve been feasting on blackberry pancakes, blackberry pies, blackberry jam, and blackberry anything else we can think of. I’m lying in bed, listening to my family. There’s not much in here: just a bed, a dresser, a painting on the wall, a few rusty sliding screens. Our window is open, and through it I can smell the sea of ferns at the base of the hill, and beyond the ferns I can smell the glossy brown mud in the cove because the tide is out. The mud smells like life, and the ferns smell green and vaguely buttery and also a little like hay. It’s a smell that reminds me of the one that comes off of newborns’ heads, their fuzzy scalps.
When we’re up here, we all tend to read a lot. We play mancala, Uno, Monopoly, chess. I knit and do yoga. David and Isaac go fishing. Isabella takes long, solitary walks from which she returns, each time, a little more wild, a little more grown-up. She and I tend to wake up late, David and Isaac quite early—sometimes hours before dawn to study the stars or to launch the rowboat for a predawn troll. We eat huge, sumptuous breakfasts and fill our days with hikes and berry-picking expeditions, walks on the beach, and quick forays into the freezing blue-gray waters. Sometimes we picnic on the flat rocks that border the cove; sometimes David and the kids dig for clams in the flats; sometimes we visit the lobster dock. In other words, all the clichés are in play up here—the jigsaw puzzles, the fog, the seashells on the windowsills, the homemade pies, the crickets in the grass, the star-encrusted skies, the deer in the woods, the sand in our beds—only they’re not clichés, they’re real, and right now I’m just listening to it. The plenitude. The bare feet on the cabin floors. The pots and pans. My husband’s voice. My children, laughing.
Off Guard
For a while, after my father was pretty much entirely out of her life and she and Tracy were living together (yet more or less separately), my mother’s drug of choice became Xanax, its frequent use justified by her teeth, neck, and jaw problems. She said it made her feel relaxed. It was supposed to be a joke. Like—her, relaxed! For some reason she openly admitted not only to using but to loving Xanax. The idea was that she was such a prim type, such a teetotaler, such a staunch opponent of all things druggy or addictive, that having a favorite pharmaceutical high was just sort of cute.
On Xanax my mother spoke extremely slowly, with swollen vowels and extended, vaguely embarrassing plosives. It really let down her guard. For example, on Xanax she didn’t care whether she was dressed or not. I know because I once came home to find her standing in the kitchen completely naked except for a pair of baggy old nylon underwear. She was eating a raw English muffin near the window, which was open.
“Mom!” I said when I saw her. “I’m home. I’m here!”
“Oh, hi, sweetie!”
“You’re naked.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking down at herself, then back at me. Grinning crookedly, she took another bite of the muffin, then explained, “You caught me off guard!”
Oily
G—, New Jersey, 1973
This photograph was taken from a child’s low perspective in front of the house with pink shutters. My mother sits on the front stoop, smoking a cigarette, wearing a pair of jeans she’d altered with a bottle of bleach (uneven splotches and dashes and dots of white are scattered all over them) and a scoop-necked T-shirt with tassels dangling from the collar and both sleeves. She smiles behind a pair of oval John Lennon–style gold-rimmed eyeglasses. I wore those glasses sometimes when I was in college. They were the entirely wrong prescription—much too strong. They made the world seem oily or underwatery. I couldn’t judge distance in them at all. But I wore them anyway because I thought they made me look elegant.
Old Enough
New York, New York, 1987
Aunt Millie stands at the head of the dining room table, which is laid for three: the Aunts and me. White china plates, real silver, linen napkins. Wearing a sober black knit dress with short sleeves and a strand of fake pearls, she holds perfectly still for the camera, which I am holding. I’m in this picture too, reflected in the mirror above the sideboard. I wear a white T-shirt and a pair of ochre-colored parachute pants, and I’m smiling, encouraging my great-grandaunt to do the same, but I don’t think she can hear me. Gazing straight into the camera, as if she were staring down death itself, she wears a completely neutral expression. She looks pretty fit considering she’s pushing ninety. She is, in fact, very near the end of her life. They both are. If I’d realized that then—if I hadn’t been such a dope—I might have spent more time with them. But as it was, I only paid them a couple visits when I was in college, despite the fact that it was just a quick subway ride downtown.
Aunt Millie served meatloaf and steamed spinach and mashed potatoes that day. Afterward, while she was doing the dishes, I sat in the living room with Aunt Gert and asked her about the old black-and-white photograph of a handsome man on her secretary desk. I’d always wondered about him but had never bothered to inquire before. The man in the picture was her brother, she said. His name was Edgar, and he’d died from a gas leak in 1951, when everybody else happened to be out of the house. They’d found him with his head resting on his neatly folded hands at the kitchen table.
“Maybe,” I started to say, “Maybe he didn’t—maybe it wasn’t—”
But Aunt Gert quickly cut me off. “It was an accident,” she said.
Since we were on the topic of family, I asked about “Pop.” The old woman licked her lips, looked intently into my eyes, and said, “He was not a good man.” Aunt Millie, who was extremely hard of hearing, was banging around pots and pans in the kitchen, making a huge racket. It smelled like the warm stewed fruit we’d soon eat for dessert.
“I’ll tell you one story,” said Aunt Gert. “Because you’re old enough to know certain things.” Then she went on to describe a trip she and Millie had taken to their niece’s house many years earlier, decades earlier, not long after my oldest uncle—my grandmother’s first child, Thor—had been born. She said my uncle was still crawling around in nothing but a diaper because it was hot that day.
“And above the diaper,” said Aunt Gert, “there was a bruise. A huge dark bruise. It covered his back, and it was shaped exactly like a man’s shoe. With a heel.” Here she sketched the outline of the thing she was describing in the air between us. “And a toe.”
Orangeade
When he went into rehab, my father lost his job. When he got out of rehab, he moved to New York City, and for a while he lived with the Aunts. Right around the same time, my mother lost her job. I think it was the drugs. She and Tracy had to move out of the duplex she’d started renting after we lost the house, and now they lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment just a couple of blocks away from the on-ramp to the George Washington Bridge. This apartment had red-white-and-blue shag carpet in the living room and floors that sagged when you walked across them. The whole place smelled like rotting wood.
Tracy waitressed several nights a week at a large Greek diner and on the weekends, too, to help with the rent. Once David and I took the bus to Jersey to visit her at the restaurant. This was an enormous place with a menu at least a dozen pages long. Tracy wore a pink dress with a white apron, white sneakers, and sheer nylons, just like all the other waitresses, only she was ten years younger than the youngest of them. On her suggestion we ordered two western omelets and two orangeades, which were a specialty of the house. As we waited for our food, I watched Tracy run around from table to table to kitchen to counter. She seemed happy and spoke in full sentences instead of grunts and eye rolls, as she did at home. She even smiled and laughed. Everyone seemed to like her: the customers joked with her; the older waitresses helped with her table clearings and coffee refills; and the owner—a short, stocky man—flirted with her almost bashfully. She was so pretty.
>
“What’s wrong?” David asked. But I couldn’t explain. It didn’t make any sense. She was right there, and yet suddenly I missed my sister so much.
Orientation
Things I’ve thrown at my father (in chronological order):
a plate of food;
a green apple;
a box of art supplies;
a heavy, old-fashioned pencil sharpener;
a sixteen-ounce jar of bitter orange marmalade.
The marmalade was part of a care package I’d assembled for him after he got out of rehab. Also in the care package were a bar of goat’s milk bath soap, some black tea, and some pistachios. These things were meant to be a kind of “welcome back” or maybe something closer to a “let’s start over” or a “no hard feelings” gesture. I was very nervous to see him. He’d been out of my life for six months. On top of that I realized that I now needed to get to know him in a different way, with the label “alcoholic” hanging over his head, so to speak. Growing up, I’d never thought of him like that, but after the incident with the word salad and the months in rehab, I finally understood that this was exactly what he was—what he had always been. Only knowing it made him seem like a stranger.
We met in the West Village, on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Tenth Street. He’d come with a friend named Sam.
“Sam’s my AA sponsor,” he explained as we stood awkwardly on the sidewalk. I’d come with David and introduced him as my boyfriend. The four of us shook hands, made forced pleasantries. It was sunny—summer was on its way—and this made me feel optimistic, but I was also tense, and when my father said the thing he shouldn’t have said, the thing that pissed me off, I just picked up the nearest small heavy object and hurled it. Now, of course, I understand that my father said what he said because he, too, was nervous. I know this because I am a parent and so have firsthand knowledge of the fact that parents can at times feel quite nervous in front of their own children, and when parents are nervous, they, like anyone else, can act like idiots. But back then, I was just a nineteen-year-old kid holding a goofy little woven basket full of things like soap and marmalade, looking at the man who was my father and realizing I hardly knew him.